Instead of the usual sprout suits the two who jumped out of the car wore bullet and knife proof jackets and balaclavas made of the same material. They were Community Protection Officers, the most feared of all sprouts. Over their balaclavas they wore goggles. They looked as fierce and as frightening as they were. They were known to be aggressive and prone to violence. Both the sprouts carried long nightsticks. Made of steel these could easily break any bone in the human body with a single blow. They were also armed with Uzi machine guns and taser guns.
‘Where are you going?’ demanded the fatter of the two Protection Officers. Other than by the slight difference in their bulk it was impossible to distinguish between the two. Neither wore numbers or any form of identification. The sprout’s balaclava had slipped a little and was half across his mouth. His words were slightly muffled but just comprehensible.
‘Home, sir,’ replied Tom. It annoyed him to have to add the ‘sir’ to his reply. But if it saved him a one way trip to Africa it was a price worth paying. He remembered that in the olden times a policeman would address members of the public as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’.
‘Where’s home?’ demanded the Protection Officer.
‘Just half a mile down the road, sir,’ said Tom, pointing in the direction he was heading.
It wasn’t a mistake. He said it deliberately.
Foolishly he hadn’t prepared an answer to the question he knew they would ask next: ‘Where have you been?’ He could hardly tell them where he’d really been. And there was a good chance that a lie would be too easy to spot. Without an instantly believable answer to that question they would arrest him. He would be on the boat to Africa before dawn. And so he deliberately distracted them, enraged them, by using an imperial measurement. Half a mile. It was the red rag. But it stopped the questioning.
The sprouts’ response was entirely as he had expected but it came surprisingly quickly. Nevertheless, the fact that he was expecting it meant that Tom was able to take the blow on his forearm, rather than his skull. The crack of the radial bone as it broke was loud; actually audible. His scream of pain was louder. The pain was genuine but Tom didn’t try to hide his distress. His only chance, he knew, was that the sprouts might be satisfied with breaking just one bone. If he showed no sign of pain they would continue beating him until he did. Pity would not save him. Contempt might. He could live with their contempt.
‘How far is it? How far is it?’ demanded the second Protection Officer. The one who had not yet spoken.
‘Less than a kilometre, sir,’ sobbed Tom. He clutched his arm and rocked backwards and forwards slightly. He did not sink to his knees. If you did that the sprouts would sometimes find the opportunity to beat you around the head quite irresistible. He had to protect his head and so he stayed standing. But he sobbed and whined and moaned and was as pitiful as he could be. Unworthy of their further attention.
‘That’s better,’ said the Protection Officer who had struck the blow.
‘Snivelling bastard,’ said the other.
And then they were gone. Walking away, laughing together, back to their car.
Tom didn’t wait. Holding his broken arm he hurried home as fast as he could go.
***
The break wasn’t as bad as it might have been.
‘Thank heavens it was a simple fracture,’ said Dorothy. A neighbour, a doctor, set the fracture, and put on a plaster of Paris cast.
‘I’m not going to be able to kill anyone for weeks,’ complained Tom.
‘It’s your left arm,’ Dorothy pointed out.
‘I’ll never be able to move the bodies,’ said Tom.
‘Then give some tutorials,’ suggested Dorothy.
Frowning in puzzlement, Tom looked at her. ‘What on earth on?’
‘Murder,’ replied Dorothy simply.
Chapter 33
Tom’s killing tutorials quickly became enormously popular. If he had been a university lecturer he would have been the faculty star.
The first tutorial was held in their tiny living room. But by the second tutorial it was clear that this simply wouldn’t work.
‘You could try the EUDCE offices again,’ suggested Dorothy.
‘I’m never going back in there!’ insisted Tom. ‘We can only use them at night. And the last time I came back from there I was lucky to escape with a broken arm.’
So they held the tutorials in the park where, if anyone stopped and wanted to know what they were doing, Tom pretended he was teaching t’ai chi classes.
‘If you break an arm or a leg he can still come at you and if he is angry and determined, which he will be, he may still kill you. You have one huge advantage: surprise. And you must use that to full effect so that you take him out of the game as quickly as possible. The only way to do this is to hit him hard on the head, thereby rendering him incapable of doing you harm, however strong and determined he may be. The sprout who is unconscious, or at the very least dizzy and confused is far less of a threat than, say, the sprout with a broken arm. You have to raise your weapon to at least his head height. What’s the easy way to do that?’
‘Stand on a chair?’ suggested someone.
Tom sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘No,’ he said, patiently. ‘Get him to sit down. Offer him a cup of tea or whatever you have to offer. Flatter him. Flirt with him. Promise him or her some or more of whatever it is that you think he or she might like.’
Tom wondered sometimes how many people outside the armed forces had given tutorials in murder.
Chapter 34
Tom, Dorothy, Dalby, Gladwys and the rest knew that killing sprouts was only half the problem.
The other half of the problem was getting rid of the bodies.
Working on the basis that the best place to hide a needle is in a sewing basket, and the best place to hide money is in a bank, they resurrected Tom’s original idea and began by hiding bodies in the few local cemeteries that were still functioning as cemeteries and which had not been turned into allotments.
This worked well for a while. Once they had found out when graves were being dug it wasn’t too difficult to sneak in at night, dig a little deeper, drop in a body and cover it with a thin layer of soil. On half a dozen occasions they managed to open up family vaults and drop in a couple of visitors.
‘Nice to have a bit of fresh blood in there,’ said Dalby. ‘Otherwise the inbreeding will result in a lower grade of ghoul.’
But they found that there was a limit to the number of times they could do this without arousing suspicions.
They finally gave up using graveyards when they heard that two separate firms of undertakers had made representations to the authorities about strange things happening to dug graves. ‘Someone’s part filling them up!’ a gravedigger had complained, after two of Tom’s students didn’t dig deep enough, and failed to leave enough room for the coffin for which the grave had originally been created. ‘We dug it plenty deep enough.’
They then tried using a graveyard which had been turned into allotments.
‘The soil there is much easier to dig,’ explained Tom. ‘It’s been well-manured and dug over so it’s easy to dig down and create a grave. The soil is softer and easier to work. It really is the best place to dig.’
All would have been well if some of the allotment holders hadn’t been so keen. When an enthusiastic gardener unearthed a body while preparing to plant his potatoes the would-be revolutionaries abandoned that idea too.
An attempt to get rid of bodies by grinding them up, spreading them over the ground and digging them in proved time-consuming, exhausting, messy and woefully ineffective. There were rumours of fingers and bits of bone being found.
A man who ran a private crematorium for pets (called Pets to Powder) helped for a while but most of his customers were sprouts (suspects couldn’t possibly afford to pay to have their pets cremated) and they began to ask questions about the vast quantities of ash being produced. After a woman sprout who had taken in a pe
t poodle complained that her pet weighed twice as much dead as he had done alive the crematorium owner told Tom that although he was with them in spirit they couldn’t use his furnaces any longer.
Attempts to get a licence for a landfill site were almost abandoned when the application forms turned up. They weighed as much as a large dog and were far more terrifying. The application finally faltered at the point where they had to admit that they were not intending to bury American radioactive rubbish in their landfill site. Thanks to a treaty between the USA and EUDCE this was, apparently, a non-negotiable requirement.
They got rid of a couple of dozen bodies by chopping them up and putting the remains into the garbage cans behind restaurants favoured by higher echelon sprouts. This seemed a good idea but two things went wrong. A chef at one of the restaurants had a nice sideline selling the contents of the bins to a dealer who used the scraps as raw ingredients in his pie making business. The dealer wasn’t a bright man but after three of his customers found wedding rings in their pies even his suspicions were aroused. ‘There are human body parts in your bins!’ he complained to the chef. Almost simultaneously, a stray dog pulled an arm out of a bin and was spotted dragging it along the pavement outside the front of the restaurant. A sprout passing by noticed the expensive, diamond-studded, solid gold Rolex watch still ticking on the disconnected wrist. After that a guard was put on garbage cans and this particular method of disposal had to end.
And then, for a while, they got rid of bodies by taking them along to the official recycling centre.
On the night they started this method of disposal, Tom and Dalby were heading for a lake where they had dumped bodies once or twice. It was late, it was dark and it was raining when they found themselves passing an authorised EUDCE tip. They had four bodies in the trailers behind their two bicycles. Both Tom and Dalby were exhausted. Riding a bicycle which is towing a dead body is like riding a tandem with one of the riders doing no pedalling. Riding a bicycle which is towing two dead bodies is twice as hard.
They both stopped for a rest.
‘How much further is the lake?’
‘Another five miles at least.’
They said nothing for a while, both of them staring at the huge sign which announced that they were standing outside EUDCE’s official recycling tip no 148273.
‘Are you thinking...’
‘I am.’
‘Which bin do we put them in?’ asked Tom, looking around. The tip was divided into dozens of sections. There were bins for electrical appliances, plain glass bottles, brown bottles, green bottles and so on.
‘This one,’ said Dalby, who was peering at the list of acceptable contents at the side of a huge metal container. There was a ramp leading up the side of the container so that suspects could throw in their rubbish.
‘What’s it for?’
‘It’s for unwanted vegetable remnants,’ said Dalby. ‘Potatoes, cauliflowers, carrots, cabbages, onions and sprouts!’
‘Perfect!’ agreed Tom.
They dragged the sprouts up the ramp and tossed them into the rotting compost below, hoping that the next suspects to use the bin would simply tip their unwanted vegetables on top of what was there without looking down, and that if they did look down they would not call one of the sprouts to tell him what they’d seen.
On a subsequent visit they even popped small sprouts into bottle banks (a process which would, in the olden days, have aroused considerable interest among the tabloid press but which didn’t even merit a mention on the Telescreen). This worked well for a couple of weeks. But bodies were spotted and extra sprouts were stationed at all refuse dumps, even when they were officially closed.
‘We’re attracting too much attention,’ said Tom one day. ‘The aim is to kill and get rid of the bodies as quietly as we can. If we arouse too much interest then we’ll be stopped. We need to hide the bodies so that they aren’t found.’
‘That’s easier to say than do,’ pointed out Gladwys.
Chapter 35
They devised a new way to confuse Europol.
Every time a sprout was dispatched, the killers removed any identification and passed it to Dorothy. And, every weekend, when the hospital was at its quietest, Dorothy would walk in, taking with her the week’s accumulation of identity cards. She would walk straight through the casualty department and log onto the computer in the ward sister’s office. Through the hospital computer she would access the national sprout register and delete the details of the sprouts they had killed. Click, click, click, they were gone for ever from the database. They did not exist. And they never had. No one could have been murdered because no one existed in the first place. The computer enabled Tom, Dorothy and the others to commit perfect crimes.
‘You can’t argue with the computer,’ workmates of the missing sprouts would be told. ‘We have no one of that name on record.’
‘But I worked with him for six years!’
‘You must be mistaken. You can’t argue with the computer.’
Chapter 36
The big problem remained: how to get rid of the bodies.
And then a solution arrived from a thoroughly unexpected quarter.
Chapter 37
They wanted to ignore whoever it was who was knocking on the door. But the unknown visitor was determined. He, she or they knocked on the door for twenty five minutes.
‘They’re not going to go away,’ whispered Dorothy eventually.
‘Give them five more minutes,’ suggested Tom.
They were standing in the hallway and they were whispering so that whoever was at the door wouldn’t know they were there.
For a few minutes everything was quiet.
‘I think they’ve gone away,’ whispered Dorothy. And then the banging started at the back door.
‘I’ll open it,’ said Tom with a sigh.
‘We thought you were in,’ said the first sprout. He was a small, swarthy looking man with a sharp, long nose and black hair combed forward. He looked as though he’d been carrying the troubles of the world on his shoulders for centuries. Tom thought he looked a little like Napoleon Bonaparte.
‘When we pushed open the letter box we could see you and hear you whispering,’ said the second sprout. He was taller, stouter and younger. He had a poor complexion and looked like a man who enjoyed bad food.
‘Are you Dorothy Cobleigh?’ asked Napoleon.
Dorothy admitted that she was. It seemed too late to pretend otherwise.
‘The sculptress?’
‘Sculptor,’ said Dorothy. ‘I prefer sculptor.’
‘We were told sculptress,’ said the stout sprout. ‘So if you don’t mind we’ll stick to that. We had a hell of a job finding you.’
‘Someone very important wants to see you,’ said Napoleon. ‘We were asked to collect you and take you to EUDCE Headquarters.’ He paused. ‘If it’s convenient to you,’ he added. He smiled. It was a scary sort of smile. ‘We were told to say that,’ he said.
‘Oh dear,’ said Dorothy. She wasn’t sure whether this was good news or bad news but the odds seemed heavily on bad.
‘Do you know what they want?’ asked Tom.
‘No idea at all,’ said Napoleon. ‘We’re just the collectors.’
‘So, is it convenient?’ asked the stout sprout.
‘Can I change my shoes?’ asked Dorothy.
‘Of course,’ said Napoleon. ‘Take all the time you like.’ He looked at his watch.
‘Can I go with her?’ asked Tom.
The stout sprout looked at his companion. ‘Don’t see why not,’ said Napoleon.
Chapter 38
They travelled in style since the Chief Commissioner had sent one of her fleet of official Rolls Royce cars to collect the sculptor. (In addition to her private collection of motor cars, the Chief Commissioner also had a fleet of six Rolls Royce limousines at her disposal.)
Sitting in the back of the car Tom and Dorothy watched a Telescreen programme in which ten contestants ha
d to use their olfactory skills to assess the faeces which had been produced by an unnamed celebrity, and to then decide what five foods the celebrity had eaten in the previous 48 hours. The winner, the contestant who got the most foods right, suggested ‘cranberries, garlic and parsnip’ but missed prunes and celery. He had been practising for nine months using his wife, workmates and neighbours as research assistants. He won a surgical operation in a sprout hospital.
‘Surgical operations are popular prizes these days,’ said Tom.
‘Pity you can’t have the operation you want,’ said Dorothy. ‘Or store up the prize until you need it.’
At the EUDCE Headquarters building Dorothy and Tom were ushered into the entrance hall where a receptionist sat at a massive oak desk upon which stood nothing but a single telephone. Two busby-wearing soldiers, one at each end of the desk, stood on guard outside smartly painted wooden sentry boxes. Dorothy thought they looked like something W. S. Gilbert might have dreamt up as an adornment for one of his Savoy operettas.
‘Dorothy Cobleigh for Sir Czardas Tsastske,’ said Napoleon, addressing the receptionist. The other sprout, the stout one, had stayed in the Rolls Royce so that he could drive it back to the garage. The Chief Commissioner liked her cars to be given a full wax and polish after every use.
The receptionist picked up her telephone, dialled 0 and waited. She then asked to be put through to Sir Czardas’s receptionist. Two minutes later she put the telephone back on its cradle, and waved an imperious and immaculately manicured hand in the direction of the lifts.
‘Third floor,’ she said, speaking with an accent Dorothy couldn’t place.
‘I thought we’d be seeing someone on one of the upper floors,’ said Tom, as they headed towards the lifts. He was feeling more confident now. The back of the limousine had been equipped with a bar, and it was the very presence of the bar, as much as the alcohol he had drunk on the journey, which had made Tom feel comfortable. It seemed unlikely to him that a journey in a car fitted with a bar could end completely badly. ‘Don’t important people usually have their offices on their top floors?’
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